1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to information handling systems and more particularly to a method for power conservation in virtualized environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
It is known to provide information handling systems with virtualized environments. In a virtualized environment, the information handling system abstracts computer resources. Thus, the physical characteristics of the computing resources are hidden from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. In a virtualized environment, a single physical resource (e.g., a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) can appear to function as multiple logical resources. Alternately, multiple physical resources (e.g., storage devices or servers) can appear as a single logical resource. Additionally in a virtualized environment, a physical resource can appear, with somewhat different characteristics, as a logical resource.
In virtualized environments, the placement and relocation decisions for virtual machines are based on a wide variety of factors such as CPU/Memory consumption, live migration requirements (e.g. shared storage, Processor Compatibility); and, attributes of the resource pool/cluster etc. Known applications to utilize such placement and relocation decisions include tools like VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). However, placement and relocation decisions often do not factor the cost of those decisions in terms of incremental power consumption.
It is known to provide power consumption estimates for different servers with different configurations and application workloads. For example, the data center capacity planner available from Dell Inc. provides such a function.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to enable power conservation when making placement and relocation decisions within a virtual environment.